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The Journal of Neuroscience, October 15, 2008, 28(42):10746-10750; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2895-08.2008

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Brief Communications
Explaining Enhanced Logical Consistency during Decision Making in Autism

Benedetto De Martino,^1 * Neil A. Harrison,^1,2 * Steven Knafo,² Geoff Bird,² and Raymond J. Dolan¹

¹Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom, and ²Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom

Correspondence should be addressed to Benedetto De Martino, Wellcome Trust Centre, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK. Email: b.martino{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk

The emotional responses elicited by the way options are framed often results in lack of logical consistency in human decision making. In this study, we investigated subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using a financial task in which the monetary prospects were presented as either loss or gain. We report both behavioral evidence that ASD subjects show a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect and psycho-physiological evidence that they fail to incorporate emotional context into the decision-making process. On this basis, we suggest that this insensitivity to contextual frame, although enhancing choice consistency in ASD, may also underpin core deficits in this disorder. These data highlight both benefits and costs arising from multiple decision processes in human cognition.

Key words: autism spectrum disorder; ASD; decision-making; rationality; economics; framing effect; skin conductance response; SCR

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Received June 23, 2008; revised July 31, 2008; accepted Aug. 4, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Benedetto De Martino, Wellcome Trust Centre, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK. Email: b.martino{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk

This article has been cited by other articles:

				B. De Martino, D. Kumaran, B. Holt, and R. J. Dolan The Neurobiology of Reference-Dependent Value Computation J. Neurosci., March 25, 2009; 29(12): 3833 - 3842. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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